Para-aesthetic Experiences

 toward a definition of art

 

     The definition of art has always been unstable and conflicted.  To some the label implies excellence, excluding doggerel of poetasters or the films of Ed Wood and Herschel Lewis.  Yet, apart from the fact that aesthetic value cannot be proven, it cannot be part of the definition or the expression “good art” would be redundant.  For much of the past many critics used a nearly class-based standard, admitting works of “high art,” while excluding folk art, popular, and mass forms.  Since the Romantics discovered folksong, however, this notion has withered, until now public media and such once august organs as the New York Times devote a good deal of their coverage to topics like Taylor Swift and new series from Netflix. 

     One way to approach a definition is to distinguish art from similar phenomena occupying neighboring semantic territory, what might be termed “para-aesthetic phenomena.”  Surveying all the arts, through the centuries and around the globe, the qualities that are generally considered to contribute to the definition of art often include the following.

 

1.  Art is a form of play involving manipulated symbols arranged and generally preserved for repeated consumption. 

2.  Art is beautiful.  Qua art, it has no other function, though it may be incidentally susceptible to other uses. 

3.  In part the beauty of art is achieved through formal or structural patterns.

4.  Art refracts lived reality, intentionally shaping the raw material of experience into significant fictions.

 

     Among the non-aesthetic forms of play are sports and games, as well as child’s play and make-believe.  Yet the footballer or the broad-jumper are dealing in physical challenges and not symbols, and the child, whether solitary or in a group, plays for the moment without a thought of preserving the fantasy for later visits.  The chief distinguishing characteristic of our species is the ability to manipulate symbols, and humans enjoy exercising this skill just as the lion relishes the pounce.  Verbal repartee may be artful, but, if not transcribed, would not be art.  The player of video games is constantly making decisions simply for the fun  of it, but the drama vanishes as soon as the play ends.  The maker of such a game game would have a stronger claim on the title of artist, though most critics would find such work too trivial to allow the maker entrance to Parnassus.  Certain works, such as true “happenings” or the sand paintings made by both Navajos and Tibetans, are likewise ephemeral, but in such cases the violation of the usual convention calls perhaps even greater attention to it.  A more precise formulation of the nature of art is required to define the frontiers of the aesthetic, but one may begin by thinking of objets d’art as artifacts of preserved play.

     Art is universally, though only in part, defined by the quality of beauty.  For a definition of beauty, Santayana’s formulation will do: beauty is “pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.”  Yet many things can give us pleasure.  Good news, a gourmet meal, or a fulfilling sexual encounter may bring considerable pleasure and yet would not usually be considered art.  Still, some non-aesthetic pleasures include characteristics of art.  Cuisine is often considered a sort of minor art as the cook must make many decisions based on taste and the whole meal is presented to the diner as a coherent progression, an experience to some extent unified.  Sexual activity likewise may well present a series of actions, a sort of play, designed to make a designed effect, but they are scarcely designed for the consumption of anyone other than the participants.  Other attributes of art must be taken into account to sharpen the focus more tightly. 

     Much of the beauty of art is based of structural or formal patterns.  The simplest and most commonly invoked are unity and symmetry, but disunity and asymmetry may find an equally important place in certain circumstances.  Formal qualities are always present, but they are most obvious in genres like music and abstract visual art.  A fugue by Bach or a Rothko canvas derive their power largely from their consumers’ apprehension of such abstract patterns.  Yet abstraction is virtually never absolute.  The mind strives to make sense of written lines and visual forms like a child looking for shapes in the clouds.  Even a totally random arrangement will be read as having meaning.  In addition this formal standard is not unique to works of art.  People also judge how pleasant it is to gaze at non-aesthetic objects, the faces of others, for instance, based on similar criteria.  While formal beauty may be found in a variety of phenomena where its presence is a matter of chance, it is intentionally created by artistic design 

     Art typically conveys a theme, that is, it suggests certain aspects of lived experience.  Vulgarly, this is the familiar “moral of the story,” often the focus of classroom investigations through secondary school and beyond.  Though technically the work of art asserts no more than the proposition that “at one time the world may have some seemed like this to someone,” such themes are often (sometimes doubtless with justice) taken to represent the opinions of the author.  In contrast to the ancient trope claiming that art “imitates” reality, most contemporary critics would prefer to acknowledge that art always alters the raw material of which it is made, making such terms as “transforming” or “refracting” more accurate.  Of course, dreams, news stories and familiar letters also relate versions of lived experience without pretensions to artistic value. 

     Since each of the defining characteristics of art present in non-aesthetic experiences as well, the judgement of whether a given object is or is not art becomes probabilistic, likelier as the evidence mounts.  A further complication arises since art may be used in non-aesthetic ways.  For instance, a philologist may in the texts of Homer find evidence for linguistic development or a historian data for the study of ancient religion, but such researches are incidental and unrelated to the artistic value of the Iliad.  Likewise, non-art may be received as though it were aesthetic experience by the appreciator of photographs from the Webb telescope or of fractal patterns.

     Art does not exist without humans; it is socially constructed, not natural.  The very concept of art has not existed in  all cultures.  For those who recognize the category, there will always remain disputed boundaries.  While most work that pretends to the status of art must probably be admitted, regardless of value, most of the questions pertain to semi-art knocking on the door from outside.  An essay on flowers or fiddlesticks will scarcely be questioned by the gatekeepers of the club of art, while an essay about that essay will be relegated to mere criticism, though it may be as beautifully written, as indeed in theory might an essay on electrical engineering.  If one admits Maxfield Parrish and Normal Rockwell to museum status, is all illustration art?  Do the journalistic war reports of Hemingway and Ernie Pyle hold aesthetic value?  How about A. J. Liebling and Red Smith’s sports stories?  Style in dress may sometimes suggest a refraction of reality.   Journal entries and sketchbook improvisations are not usually intended to outlast the day of their creation, yet, once preserved, may, like the jottings of Pepys and Picasso, be highly valued.  Religious myth and liturgy, while clearly composed of narrative and drama, claim other primary uses.  Art’s definition is worth pursuing even if it cannot be precisely and finally formulated.  Art is, as well, dynamic, and will evolve even under study. 

Language and Lies in Sand’s Indiana

 

Passages cited from the novel are in my own off-the-cuff translations.  Endnotes provide the text in the original French and the chapter in which each occurs.

 

     Amantine Aurore Dupin, who published under the name George Sand, produced a prodigious body of work, amounting to perhaps seventy novels and fifty other volumes, becoming one of the most popular writers of her day.  She was, however, and remains today, at least as well-known for her life as for her writing.  The attention she drew is hardly surprising as she courted notoriety, smoking tobacco and wearing men’s clothing while conducting numerous love affairs with both women such as actress Marie Dorval and with male fellow artists Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de Musset, and Frédéric Chopin among others.  In spite of her sometimes transgressive ways, her work was immensely popular with the public while critics, since Victor Hugo at her funeral labeled her an immortal, have consistently regarded her as one of the greatest novelists of nineteenth century France.

     Just as her lifestyle in some ways defied the norms of her time, her version of Romanticism included anti-Romantic parody and ample irony.  The natural description in the conclusion of her first novel Indiana is more straightforward Romanticism, celebrating Réunion’s simple island scenery as at once idyllic in its serenity and picturesque in its confusion: “in the Brulé de Saint Paul all the forms, all the beauty, all the playful and vigorous elements, these are all recombined, superimposed and arranged, put together in a single stormy night.” [1]  The trajectory of the theme as a whole is romantic as well as Romantic with its happy ending, a satisfying marriage with Ralph, isolated from the world but sustained by mutual love.

     Sand, however, often casts a caustic satiric eye on society and portrays the provincials as cruel, hypocritical, and thoughtless.  Romantic assumptions are deflated in the observation that “this was not the first time that Raymon had seen a woman take love seriously, though, luckily for society, such examples are rare” [2]  The locals are seen as vain and malicious.  “The spirit of a small town is, as you surely know, the most wicked in the world.  Good people are never recognized there, and any superior minds are natural enemies of the public . . . If you make war on prejudice, pettiness, vice, you insult them personally, you attack that which to them is dearest” [3]  Sand deserves the recognition from  feminists for identifying the sexism that unjustly limits women’s roles.  Indiana defiantly says to her husband, “I know I am the slave and you the lord.  The law of the land makes you the master. . . . but my will, monsieur, is my own.”  [4]  The novel’s primary plot thread, woven of Indiana’s contrasting relations with Raymon and Ralph, takes place against a backdrop of town gossips whose idle talk easily turns malicious.

     The general social critique and its pointed sexist corollary are exemplified in Raymon’s relation with Indiana.  He is no worse than typical when it seems to him that anyone would be “ungrateful” were he to “reproach Providence for the unhappiness of others when he himself has had only her smiles and favors.” [5]  He takes advantage of a vulnerable woman with blithe entitlement and without hesitation. Raymon is surely exceptional, however, in the extent to which he maintains such an elaborate façade of Romantic notions.  His use of language is as spirited as it is mendacious.  He had “a rare faculty . . . of refuting positive truth by sheer talent,” which served him as well in then government as in his personal life.  For him language is “a queen of prostitutes” and he possesses the “rare skill to refute a plain truth through his skills.” [6]  He repeatedly generates great smokescreens of words to obscure his true motives and intentions, most extravagantly in chapters vi, xvii, xviii, and xxii, with rhetoric.  The reader knows his ach-romantic fusillades are insincere show-pieces, meant only to gain him an amusing if temporary lover while at the same time displaying his genteel accomplishments. 

Right now, Indiana, give me orders!  I am your slave, you know that perfectly well.  I would give my life for an hour in your arms, I would suffer all my life for one of your smiles.  I am willing to be your friend, your brother, nothing more.  If I suffer, you shall not know it.  [7]

He says this, claiming as he does a suffering which he scarcely feels.  His language conceals the truth, asserting a tender and vulnerable heart while the reader recognizes that it in fact reveals his cruel duplicity.

     The showy fraud of his language is only emphasized by the contrast with its complement in the usage of Ralph who feels emotions strongly but says nothing.  It is little wonder that the reader does not perceive the depth of his feelings having read early on that his “only passion was fox-hunting.” [8]  The reader assumes the omniscient narrator is accurate in the devastating observation that, though Sir Ralph’s portrait has little to recommend it with all its “puerile fidelities” and “bourgeois minutiae,” “there was in the world only one thing on earth more insignificant than the portrait, and that was its original.” [9]  Yet this impression turns out tom be wholly mistaken.  Though “giving all the appearance of coldness and selfishness,” in fact “hunting and study had been only a pretext to conceal his long and bitter reveries.” [10]  Ironically, while he is labeled an “egoist” due to his “stone mask,” he was, in fact “born to love.” [11]  This contradiction is for Ralph “the secret of my life.” [12]

     Still, the truth about Ralph’s emotional life does emerge.  He and Indiana contemplate a Romantic double suicide like that of Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, but they stop short of that irrevocable step and claim a happy if isolated life on a remote plantation.  There, with their removal from the web of social lies, they may tend their gardens in peace.   

     Such a conclusion is profoundly Romantic and Sand is routinely and casually called a Romantic, but this usage is imprecise.  In Indiana she engages Romantic conventions, but only to confute them.  The rural setting is satirized rather than idealized; it is full of venal and vicious types, though Eden recurs in the “Indian cottage” [13] of the conclusion.  Mme. Delvare’s passions led her only into self-deception.  The choice of Ralph, who had earlier seemed impossibly dull, turns out to be the right one and marriage more satisfying than an affair.  The glorious display of language, the sort of thing that Wordsworth considered the “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion” is in this novel a pernicious and deceitful spectacle.  Perhaps in response to the requirements of a popular novel (and Sand was long a best-selling writer), in spite of the author’s own counter-cultural lifestyle and her dim view of the provincials, her leading lady (in spite of her errors of a mésalliance and an infatuation) and leading man (though more silent than most strong and silent heroes) are quite conventional.  From the tensions generated by these dialectics – popular and rebellious, Romantic and Realistic, art as truth and art as lies – rises the music of the novel. 

 

  

1.  Conclusion ”Dans le Brûlé de Saint-Paul, toutes les formes, toutes les beautés, toutes les facéties, toutes les hardiesses ont été réunies, superposées, agencées, construites en une nuit d’orage.”

2.  ch. xii “Ce n’était pas la première fois que Raymon voyait une femme prendre l’amour au sérieux, quoique ces exemples soient rares, heureusement pour la société.”

3.  ch. xix “L’esprit des petites villes est, vous le savez sans doute, le plus méchant qui soit au monde. Là, toujours les gens de bien sont méconnus, les esprits supérieurs sont ennemis-nés du public . . . Faites-vous la guerre aux préjugés, aux petitesses, aux vices, vous les insultez personnellement, vous les attaquez dans ce qu’ils ont de plus cher.”

4.  ch. xxi “Je sais que je suis l’esclave et vous le seigneur. La loi de ce pays vous a fait mon maître . . . mais sur ma volonté, monsieur, vous ne pouvez.”

5.  . ch. x “Quel homme est assez ingrat envers la Providence pour lui reprocher le malheur des autres, si pour lui elle n’a eu que des sourires et des bienfaits ?”

6.  x  “une reine prostituée, ”“Cette rare faculté qu’il possédait, de réfuter par le talent la vérité positive”

7.  xviii “À présent, ordonne, Indiana ! je suis ton esclave, tu le sais bien. Je donnerais ma vie pour une heure passée dans tes bras ; mais je puis souffrir toute une vie pour obtenir un de tes sourires. Je serai ton ami, ton frère, rien de plus. Si je souffre, tu ne le sauras pas.”

8.  vi “un Anglais passionné seulement pour la chasse du renard!”

9.  xxx “toutes ses puérilités de ressemblance, toutes ses minuties bourgeoises,” “Il n’y avait qu’une chose au monde qui fût plus insignifiant que ce portrait, c’était l’original.”

10.  xxiv “donner toutes les apparences de la froideur et de l’égoïsme,” “Et pourtant la chasse et l’étude n’étaient que le prétexte dont il couvrait ses amères et longues rêveries.”

11.  xxx “un masque de pierre,” “j’etais né pour aimer.”                                                                                 

12.  xxx “c’est le secret de ma vie.”

13.  Conclusion “notre chaumière indienne.”

Yvan Goll’s Surrealism

 

Next month I mean to post an analysis of Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto.

 

     While Surrealism is generally identified with André Breton and defined by his manifestos, he was the inventor neither of the movement nor of many of its ideas.  The term had been used in May 1917 by Apollinaire in his program notes for Cocteau’s Parade (a legendary production that featured the work of Massine, Picasso, and Satie) and again a month later for Apollinaire’s own play Les Mamelles de Tirésias.  In October of the same year, only weeks before Breton published his first manifesto, Yvan Goll included an unsigned manifesto he had written as the first article in  his journal Surréalisme.  The inaugural issue which included contributions from Apollinaire, Reverdy, Crevel, Jean Painlevé, and Robert Delaunay among others, turned out to be the only one.  The vagaries of literary fashion have resulted in Breton’s manifestos being reprinted and cited countless times, while Goll’s is quite difficult to find.  After failing to find any English translation, I made my own.

     Both Breton and Goll had a band of partisans and the meaning of the term Surrealism was debated for a time in journals and cafés, but this dispute arose as much from friendships and early associations as from disagreements about theory.  (In fact, the Surrealist group always included artists with a wide variety of styles.)  Goll, born Isaac Lang in Alsace-Lorraine, went on to write Expressionist plays and screenplays and to translate Joyce’s Ulysses.  His books of poetry were illustrated by such artists as by  Georg Grosz, Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger (Der Neue Orpheus) and Pablo Picasso (Élégie d'Ihpetonga suivi des masques de cendre).

     Goll’s version of Surrealism has in common with Breton’s the preference for unlikely metaphor, the sort of juxtaposition identified with Lautréamont’s formula from Les Chants de Maldoror: “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”  In Goll’s words “The most beautiful images are those that bring together bits of reality far distant from one another as directly as swiftly as possible.”  This emphasis on the vividly presented image constitutes the modernity of the technique he prescribes, emphasized by his requirement that poetry should be “direct” and “intense” and avoid “abstract or second-hand notions” such as “logic, aesthetic theory, grammatical effects, and word-play” (while apparently allowing his own governing theory).

     Goll takes the opposite of Breton’s position from the start, however, when he acknowledges “reality” as “the basis for all great art.”  Indeed, all art might equally be described as Goll defines surrealism, as the “transposing of reality into a higher plan,” in other words, the phenomenal world filtered through the artist’s consciousness.  Art, he maintains, is put together out of the “raw material” of experience like the wallpaper included in a Cubist collage or the use of overheard talk mentioned by Max Jacob, or, indeed, the sources of any writer who makes something new based on experience.

     Goll dismisses popular entertainment, for him an oddly broad term covering not only both ballet and the music hall, but “all curious and picturesque art, art founded on eroticism and exoticism, strange art, unsettled art, frivolous and decadent art” as well.  He rejects Dada as well which for him consists of simply seeking to épater les bourgeois. 

     Most pointedly he condemns Breton’s Surrealism without naming his rival, saying that it, too, aims only at scandal and sensation and, with its fascination with dreams, erroneously makes of Freud “a new Muse.”  Goll insists as an axiom that “our physical organism” “instructs us that reality is always right” and “that life is truer than thought.”

   The fact is that his assertion that modern art centers on the image has proven substantially true in terms of the history of poetry.  From the Imagists through the Objectivists and later the practitioners of what some call the “deep image” and some “leaping images” this focus remained central for much of the twentieth century.  

     Goll’s place in the origin of Surrealism has been largely obscured by Breton’s success in assuming the role of leader of the Surrealist movement, with the authority to define the meaning of the term.  Yet both as a poet and as a critic Goll merits the attention of the historian of modern art and in particular of the avant-garde.  Evaluation of the following manifesto is perhaps the initial step in reassessing his significance in the art of the twentieth century.

 

 

 

 

Yvan Goll’s Surrealist Manifesto

 

     Reality is the basis of all great art.  Without it there is no life, no substance. Reality is the earth under our feet and the sky over our heads.

     Everything that the artist creates has an origin in nature. The Cubists, when they were new, understood that, as humble as the purest primitives, they lowered themselves radically into the simplest object, into what is valueless, and went so far as to stick a piece of wallpaper onto a painting, in all its reality.

     This transposing of reality into a higher (artistic) plan constitutes surrealism.

     Surrealism is a concept arising from Guillaume Apollinaire.  Looking at his poetic body of work, we find the same elements as in the earliest cubists: the words of everyday life possess for him a “strange magic” and it is with these, the raw material of writing, that he worked.  Max Jacob tells how one day he simply noted down words and phrases he overheard on the street and made of them a poem.

        With this raw material alone, he formed poetic images.  Today the image is the criterion for good poetry.  The rapidity of association between the first and second impression constitutes the quality of the image. 

    The first poet observed, “The sky is blue.”  Somewhat later, another declared, “Your eyes are blue like the sky.”  A good while later another ventured to say, “You have the sky in your eyes.”   A modern will cry out, “Your heavenly eyes!”  The most beautiful images are those that bring together bits of reality far distant from one another as directly as swiftly as possible. 

     Thus the image has become the most appreciated element in modern poetry.  Before the beginning of the twentieth century it was the ear that determined the quality of poetry: rhythm, sonority, cadence, alliteration, rhyme, all are for the ear.  In the last twenty years, the eye has had its revenge.  It is the century of movies.  We communicate better with visual signs.  And it is speed that makes quality today.

     Art is an emanation of human life and the human organism.  Surrealism, the expression of our own age, takes into account takes into account the symptoms that characterize our time: it is direct, intense, and it pushes back against those arts that rest on abstract or second-hand notions: logic, aesthetic theory, grammatical effects, and word-play.

     Surrealism would not be satisfied to be the mode of expression of a coterie or a country: it will be international; it will absorb all the “isms” that share Europe and will gather up the vital components of each.

     Surrealism is a vast movement in our time.  It signifies health and will with ease hold off the tendencies to decomposition and morbidity that come up wherever something is being built.

     The art of entertainment, of the ballet and the music hall, all curious and picturesque art, art founded on eroticism and exoticism, strange art, unsettled art, frivolous and decadent art will soon cease to amuse a generation that, after the war, needed only to forget.

      And the counterfeit of Surrealism which some ex-Dadas dreamed up to continue to shock the bourgeoisie, will soon be out of circulation.

     They affirm “the omnipotence of the dream” and make of Freud a new Muse.  That Dr. Freud makes use of dreams to cure highly terrestrial problems is all very well.  But to apply his doctrines to the world of poetry, is that not to confound art and psychiatry?

    Their concept of a “psychic mechanism based on the dream and the free play of thought” can never be strong enough to conquer our physical organism, which instructs us that reality is always right, and that life is truer than thought.

       Our surrealism recovers nature, the primal emotions of man, and proceeds, with entirely new artistic material, toward creation, toward an act of will.